Poet Rick Benjamin: Being present in the ordinary to savor the experiences

Once, after a semester-ending celebration at my house, a student offered to help me clean up. I could hear him asking mostly out of politeness (courtesy counts for a lot, but isn’t always labor intensive)...

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By
Rick Benjamin
Posted Nov. 3, 2013 @ 12:01 am

Once, after a semester-ending celebration at my house, a student offered to help me clean up. I could hear him asking mostly out of politeness (courtesy counts for a lot, but isn’t always labor intensive), so I quickly said I’d do the dishes myself. He replied, more honestly, that he absolutely hated doing the dishes, especially when they were so piled up. Then I heard myself say — as if they were words coming out of someone else’s mouth, but also ones I could, myself, live by — but how can you not relish another encounter with water? My hands were already in it at this point, and I was, indeed, being rewarded. Even if, during my years in a restaurant, I’d loathed the task, this newfound awareness quickly had its way with me, and the pleasing sensation of feeling water wash over my hands has never really gone away.

It is easier to be more fully present to the “important” tasks in one’s day — say, that conference call with your funders in D.C. — than it is to be alert to other activities constituting human lives: proofreading your 17-year-old daughter’s college essay, paying the parking tickets that have been piling up for weeks, mowing the front lawn that is really just green weeds. Our most forgettable moments are worth bearing witness to; how we approach them defines us, in terms of character, as much as any more newsworthy act.

It is one of the things that I admire about this poem, by Alberto Ríos, called “Eating Potato Chips in Middle Age”:

When I eat a salty potato chip, now,

I’m wild and do not waste

What is crisp, I taste it

And chew it to a crinkled knot.

As the first two couplets roll out, you can sense how much fun the poet is having, how much he is enjoying this now. Ríos makes such lovely music of the moment, the sound of “chip” picking up “crisp,” the sweet irony of “waste” finding “taste” in the next line. It’s alliterative, as well, this wildness the middle-aged poet is speaking of, sounding the task in his mouth:

I taste and lisp out

Nothing. I keep it all and keep it

In, I let it go

Out in songs, the breath toward

Music, the tendons toward dance, that

gorging, that coming back…

I can’t help but smile again at this kind of “coming back,” like some Greek god-man going home to a certain celebration, as if the mouth wants countless returns, mostly at a gallop:

… The mouth thinking it

Makes water, that horse

Potato chip kicking, hooves and shoes

Hard against the stall, the walls

The mouth has…

This metamorphosis of eating chips into something unharnessed and equine is ironic, too much, maybe, for one middle-aged man’s heart to handle. But this “return,” finally, is also toward the most humble thought of all, the one that closes the poem:

… a potato chip.

Think it, and in the mouth something happens.

“Something happens.” That’s all that being present to anything involves — no more and no less — just noticing, each moment, your life going on, with or without you witnessing it in any particular way. Now you’re changing diapers, now making art, answering the telephone. The point is that these are all connected, worthy of the same quality of attention: the laudable (some canvases I’ve seen) and the laughable (some dirty diapers I’ve seen). When my own three kids were babies and I was the one at home with them, I remember mock-bragging about how many diapers I’d changed in a single year, while knowing, well, that I actually enjoyed that task. We all laughed and loved a lot during diaper changes; let’s just say that they were not the only ones slightly thrown by the transition to toilet.

Recently, in a class at RISD, I asked my students, spinning off of Ríos’ poem, simply to be present to something in their own lives. Here is what Marisha Lozada had to say:

sleeping alone at nineteen

free from cords of embrace

tongue on shoulderblades

jutting knees — free

to sweat or toss

hum or retch

stare awake or get something

else to eat.

thrust and suck and paw,

scratch and grip — they lie

under different darkness.

tonight is you, with more

blanket than you need

an extra pillow

sirens

rain.

In Marisha’s poem, the sounds of the sensual are set alongside the sounds one hears in solitude, “sirens/rain.” It’s wistful at the end, because there’s “more/blanket than you need/an extra pillow,” but the poet has nevertheless been equally present to what’s not there but could be — that is, someone else — and not always in a pleasant or comfortable way. “Thrust and suck and paw,” “cords,” “jutting,” “scratch and grip:” all of these words have a visceral ambivalence about them. The poet has clearly let herself discover the complexity of the situation she is both present to and describing.

And here is another short but powerful poem by Sarah Plummer, living in Providence by way of Sydney, Australia:

Rust takes to metal with dubious grace

lassoing my waist

in one stroke

you draw up my scent from lank height:

pepper, guaiac, vetiver.

It’s hard to think

I was one of two kids

splintering each other.

He could smell me

too, followed my smoke to its fire.

Even the registering of “scent” is done to great effect here, each word receiving the same substantial weight. Again, this is not an easy poem, as it bears witness to unease, to some of the more unsettling qualities of attraction. But, again, it succeeds brilliantly in terms of being present to a given moment. Relationships, same as potato chips, deserve our vigilant attention.